Book Review
'An Unfinished Season': Double lives and disturbing mysteries

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times book critic

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Midway through Ward Just's rich new nugget of a novel, there's a half-comical, half-serious confrontation of sensibilities that sums up much of what the book is about.

Nineteen-year-old narrator Wilson Ravan ("Wils"), the privileged son of a printing-company owner, has just finished his summer gig as an intern at a Chicago newspaper. Asked by his boss if he learned anything, Wils holds forth eloquently, "I learned there are some stories you'll never get to the bottom of. You'll try and try and come up empty. And those are the most interesting stories of all, and the ones that people remember because the question remains unanswered."

His boss's response: "You'll never be a reporter."

A great one-liner — but Just then takes it beyond a one-liner, as the boss expands on his point: "You like mystery. You don't care much for the truth. But that's not what reporters do. When reporters find things out, they demystify."

There's clearly some of Just in Wils — for Just, a former journalist, has made his name writing novels that come at their subject matter from a sidewinding, mystery-rich angle. In "A Dangerous Man," he weighed the consequences of America's earliest involvement in Vietnam by focusing on French and American hangers-on who were there before any U.S. military consultants turned up on the scene. In "Echo House," nominated for a National Book Award, Just explored the political process in Washington, D.C., by portraying a dynasty of behind-the-scenes powermongers from 1916 to the present.

"An Unfinished Season" by Ward Just Houghton Mifflin, 251 pp., $24

"An Unfinished Season," at first glimpse, appears to be less ambitious: a coming-of-age novel taking place entirely in one city, Chicago, and covering just a brief period of weeks. But this description doesn't do the book justice. Questions of class warfare, generational conflict, social conformity and the openness of reality to a variety of interpretations all come into play here. The result is a novel that, on a deliberately circumscribed canvas, manages to paint a very big picture.

The time is the 1950s. Eisenhower is in office. And Wils Ravan, when he isn't being a novice reporter, is hitting the debutante party circuit on Chicago's affluent North Shore and enjoying "an appealing double life, bon vivant by night, working man by day."

Not all is well on the home front, however. Wils' father, whose hands-on approach to his printing business has been undermined recently by his forays into real-estate, is facing a strike by his workers and is handling the crisis in a blustering and far-from-productive manner. While Wils defends his father publicly, he questions him privately, as does Wils' mother. Anonymous threats against the family, and minor violence at their country home, heighten the tension.

Tensions of another sort — sexual, flirtatious — underlie Wils' appearances on the dance circuit. When he meets Aurora Brule, an 18-year-old living an enviably urbane existence — big-city apartment, mysterious psychiatrist father — Wils is totally smitten.

Shuttling back and forth between these various worlds, however, Wils soon loses his way. He's a smart kid, but he's up against events that would stymie even an experienced character: an unexpected death, the conundrum of conflicting class interests, the aftershocks of war (both Korea and World War II).

To say more would be to give too much away. Just has always been a sociologically sharp writer, but in "An Unfinished Season" he's just as sharp psychologically, especially as he traces the complex dance of wills that goes on between Wils, his father and his mother. The rarefied world of Aurora and her father feels a little more contrived, a little more brittle — but that, at least in part, is intentional.

Just's descriptions of the newspaper office ("cigarette butts on the floor, overflowing wastebaskets, pint bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags") have a nicely raffish flair. Even more vivid is the way he evokes Chicago's sense of its own isolation from the halls of power, in New York, Washington, D.C., and even London.

As fate throws Wils a maverick combination of challenges, reversals and revelations, the book grows distinctly odd in shape. But unlike "The Weather in Berlin" — Just's ambitious but unwieldy novel from two years ago — "An Unfinished Season" stays tightly wrought throughout, even as it hones in on "a loose end that would stay loose" in Wils' life. For Just, as for Wils, the mystery of that "loose end" exerts considerably more fascination than any mere journalistic fact.

The result is one of Just's finest novels.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com. He has been the Seattle Times book critic since 1998, and has also published four novels.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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